A project titled "Establishing the advanced disaster reduction management system by fusion of real-time disaster simulation and big data assimilation," was launched as Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Intended to save as many lives as possible in future national crises involving earthquake and tsunami disasters, the project works on a disaster mitigation system of the big data era, based on cooperation of large-scale, high-resolution, real-time numerical simulations and assimilation of real-time observation data. The world's most advanced specialists in disaster simulation, disaster management, mathematical science, and information science work together to create the world's first analysis platform for real-time simulation and big data that effectively processes, analyzes, and assimilates data obtained through various observations. Based on quantitative data, the platform designs proactive measures and supports disaster operations immediately after disaster occurrence. The project was launched in 2014 and is working on the following issues at present.
Sophistication and fusion of simulations and damage prediction models using observational big data: Development of a real-time simulation core system that predicts the time evolution of disaster effect by assimilating of location information, fire information, and building collapse information which are obtained from mobile terminals, satellite images, aerial images, and other new observation data in addition to sensing data obtained by the undersea high-density seismic observation network.
Latent structure analysis and major disaster scenario creation based on a huge amount of simulation results: Development of an analysis and extraction method for the latent structure of a huge amount of disaster scenarios generated by simulation, and creation of severe scenarios with minimum "unexpectedness" by controlling disaster scenario explosion (an explosive increase in the number of predicted scenarios).
Establishment of an earthquake and tsunami disaster mitigation big data analysis platform: Development of an earthquake and tsunami disaster mitigation big data analysis platform that realizes analyses of a huge number of disaster scenarios and increases in speed of data assimilation, and clarifies the requirements for operation of the platform as a disaster mitigation system.
The project was launched in 2014 as a 5-year project. It consists of element technology development and system fusion, feasibility study as a next-generation disaster mitigation system (validation with/without introduction of the developed real-time simulation and big data analysis platform) in the affected areas of the Great East Japan Earthquake, and test operations in affected areas of the Tokyo metropolitan earthquake and the Nankai Trough earthquake.
 A. Suppasri, S. Koshimura, K. Imai, E. Mas, H. Gokon, A. Muhari, and F. Imamura, "Damage characteristic and field survey of the 2011 great east japan tsunami in Miyagi prefecture," Coastal Engineering Journal, Vol.54, No.1, 125005-1-30, 2012, DOI: 10.1142/S0578563412500052.
 S. Koshimura, S. Hayashi, and H. Gokon, "Lessons from the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake Tsunami Disaster," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.8 No.4, pp. 549-560, 2013.
 Y. Yamamoto, K. Obana, S. Kodaira, R. Hino, and M. Shinohara, "Structural heterogeneities around the megathrust zone of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake from tomographic inversion of onshore and offshore seismic observations," J. Geophys. Res., 2013.
 T. Hori and S. Miyazaki, "A possible mechanism of M9 earthquake generation cycles in the area of repeating M7-8 earthquakes surrounded by aseismic sliding," Earth Planets Space, Vol.63, No.7, pp. 773-777, 2011.
 M. Ohtani, K. Hirahara, Y. Takahashi, T. Hori, M. Hyodo, H. Nakashima, and T. Iwashita, "Fast Computation of Quasi-Dynamic Earthquake Cycle Simulation with Hierarchical Matrices," Procedia Computer Science, Vol.4, pp. 1456-1465, 2011.
 S. Hayashi and S. Koshimura, "The 2011 Tohoku Tsunami Flow Velocity Estimation by the Aerial Video Analysis and Numerical Modeling," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.8 No.4, pp. 561-572, 2013.
 M. Akiyama, D. M. Frangopol, M. Arai, and S. Koshimura, "Reliability of Bridges under Tsunami Hazards: Emphasis on the 2011 Tohoku-Oki Earthquake," Earthquake Spectra, Vol.29, No.S1, pp. S295165UTF2013S314, 2013. doi: 10.1193/1.4000112.
 A. Muhari, S. Koshimura, and F. Imamura, "Performance evaluation of pedestrian bridge as vertical evacuation site during the 2011 tsunami in Japan," Journal of Natural Disaster Science, Vol.34, No.1, pp. 79-90, 2012.
 A. Suppasri, E. Mas, S. Koshimura, K. Imai, K. Harada, and F. Imamura, "Developing tsunami fragility curves from the surveyed data of the 2011 great east japan tsunami in Sendai and Ishinomaki plains," Coastal Engineering Journal, Vol.54, No.1, 125008-1-16, 2012, DOI: 10.1142/S0578563412500088.
 Y. Suga, S. Koshimura, and E. Kobayashi, "Risk Evaluation of Drifting Ship by Tsunami," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.8 No.4, pp. 573-583, 2013.
 W. Liu, F. Yamazaki, H. Gokon, and S. Koshimura, "Extraction of Tsunami Flooded Areas and Damaged Buildings in the 2011 Tohoku, Japan Earthquake from TerraSAR-X Intensity Images," Earthquake Spectra, Vol.29, No.S1, pp. S183-S200, 2013, doi: 10.1193/1.4000120.
 H. Gokon and S. Koshimura, "Mapping of building damage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake tsunami in Miyagi Prefecture," Coastal Engineering Journal, Vol.54, No.1, 125006-1-12, 2012, DOI: 10.1142/S0578563412500064.
 B. Mehran and M. Kuwahara, "Fusion of probe and fixed sensor data for short-term traffic prediction in urban signalized arterials," Special Issue for the International Journal of Urban Sciences on Urban Transportation, 2013, DOI:10.1080/12265934.2013.776291.
 M. Kuwahara, T. Ohata, T. Takigawa, K. Abe, and T. Imai, "Estimating Vehicle Trajectories on Signalized Urban Arterial and a Motorway by Data Fusion of Probe and Detector Data," OPTIMUM2013 – International Symposium on Recent Advances of Transport Modeling, Brisbane, Australia, 2013.
 M. Kuwahara, "How People Moved just after Great East Japan Earthquake," OPTIMUM2013 – International Symposium on Recent Advances of Transport Modeling, Brisbane, Australia, 2013.
 M. Kuwahara and Y. Hara, "Traffic Congestion Monitoring immediately after a Major Natural Disaster : a Case Study in Ishinomaki City at Great East Japan Earthquake," Expressways and Automobiles, Vol.56, No.9, pp. 48-51, 2013 (in Japanese).
 M. A. H. Khan, D. Bollegala, G. Liu, and K. Sezaki, "Delineating Real-Time Events by Identifying Relevant Tweets with Popular Discussion Points," ASE HUMAN Journal, Vol.1, No.3, pp. 136-150, 2013.
 T. Horanont, S. Phithakkitnukoon, T. W. Leong, Y. Sekimoto, and R. Shibasaki, "Weather Effects on the Patterns of People's Everyday Activities: A study using GPS traces of mobile phone users," PLOS ONE, Vol.8, No.12, e81153, 2013.
 E. Mas, A. Suppasri, F. imamura, and S. Koshimura, "Agent-based Simulation of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Evacuation: An Integrated Model of Tsunami Inundation and Evacuation," Journal of Natural Disaster Science, Vol.34, No.1, pp. 41-57, 2012.
 T. Osaragi and T. Oki, "Evaluation of Improvement Projects in Densely Built-up Wooden Residential Area in terms of Difficulty in Wide-area Evacuation," Journal of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Engineering, Vol.79, No.696, pp. 437-444, 2014 (in Japanese).
 T. Osaragi, T. Morisawa, and T. Oki, "Simulation Model of Evacuation Behavior Following a Large-scale Earthquake that Takes into Account Various Attributes of Residents and Transient Occupants," Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, Springer, pp. 469-484, 2014.
 T. Osaragi and K. Suzuki, "Wide-area Evacuation of Elder Care Facility Users in Case of Large Urban Fires Following a Major Earthquake," Journal of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Engineering, Vol.78, No.685, pp. 557-563, 2013 (in Japanese).
 Y. Ishikawa, T. Okumura, S. Fujikawa, J. Miyakoshi, H. Fujiwara, N. Morikawa, and N. Nojima, "Validation of the Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Maps for Japan," Journal of Japan Association for Earthquake Engineering, Vol.11, No.4, pp. 68-87, 2011 (in Japanese).
 M. Kuwahara, T. Yoshii, H. Morita, and H. Okamura, "A Development of a Dynamic Traffic Simulation Model for Urban Road Networks," SOUND, SEISAN KENKYU, Vol.48, No.10, pp. 511-514, 1996.
 H. Gokon, S. Koshimura, and M. Matsuoka, "Object-Based Method for Estimating Tsunami-Induced Damage Using TerraSAR-X Data," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 225-235, 2016.
 W. Liu, F. Yamazaki, and T. Sasagawa, "Monitoring of the Recovery Process of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant from VHR SAR Images," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 236-246, 2016.
 T. Baba, N. Takahashi, T. Hori, and Y. Kaneda, "Tsunami early prediction using DONET: tsunami amplification factor and area mapping of sudden pressure decrease (HDS26-P04)," Abstracts, Japan Geoscience Union Meeting, 2013.
 T. Hori, S. Miyazaki, M. Hyodo, R. Nakata, and Y. Kaneda, "An earthquake forecasting system based on the sequential data assimilation of the slip on the plate boundary," Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Japan, Vol.62, pp. 179-189, 2013.
 R. Nakata, M. Hyodo, and T. Hori, "Possible slip history scenarios for the Hyuga-nada region and Bungo Channel and their relationship with Nankai earthquakes in southwest Japan based on numerical simulations," J. Geophysical Research, Vol.119, No.6, pp. 4787-4801, 2014.
 T. Hori, M. Hyodo, S. Miyazaki, and Y. Kaneda, "Numerical forecasting of the time interval between successive M8 earthquakes along the Nankai Trough, southwest Japan, using ocean bottom cable network data," Marine Geophysical Research, Vol.35, No.3, pp.285-294, 2014. DOI: 10.1007/s11001-014-9226-8.
 Y. Nakanishi-Ohno, K. Nagata, H. Shouno, and M. Okada, "Distribution estimation of hyperparameters in Markov random field models," Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, Vol.47, No.4, 045001-1-14, 2014.
 S. Yotsukura, T. Omori, K. Nagata, and M. Okada, "Sparse Estimation of Spike-Triggered Average," IPSJ Transactions on Mathematical Modeling and Its Applications, Vol.7, No.1, pp. 15-21, 2014.
 N. Hirokawa and T. Osaragi, "Earthquake Disaster Simulation System: Integration of Models for Building Collapse, Road Blockage, and Fire Spread," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 175-187, 2016.
 T. Oki and T. Osaragi, "Modeling Human Behavior of Local Residents in the Aftermath of a Large Earthquake . Wide-area Evacuation, Rescue and Firefighting in Densely Built-upWooden Residential Areas," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 188-197, 2016.
 K. Ito, A. Aono, and N. Ohmori, "Empirical Study on Stop-Offs en Route Home in the Aftermath of an Earthquake Disaster in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area – Analyses Based on an Online Questionnaire Survey about the Great East Japan Earthquake," Journal of the City Planning Institute of Japan, Vol.48, No.3, pp. 873-878, 2013 (in Japanese).
 T. Osaragi, "Modeling of Decision Making and Behavior for Returning Home after a Devastating Earthquake," Journal of Architecture and Planning, Vol.73, No.634, pp. 2679-2687, 2008 (in Japanese).
 P. J. Van Leeuwen, "Nonlinear data assimilation in geosciences: an extremely efficient particle filter," Q.J.R. Meteorol. Soc., Vol.136, pp. 1991-1999, 2010, doi:10.1002/qj.699.
 S. Aoki and K. Sezaki, "Negative Surveys with Randomized Response Techniques for Privacy-aware Participatory Sensing," IEICE Transactions on Communications, Vol.E97-B, No.4, pp. 721-729, 2014.
 T. Nakamura, Y. Sekimoto, T. Usui, and R. Shibasaki, "Estimation of People Flow in an Urban Area Using Particle Filter," Journal of Japan Society of Civil Engineers, Ser. D3 (Infrastructure Planning and Management), Vol.69, No.3, pp. 227-236, 2013 (in Japanese).
 A. Witayangkurn, T. Horanont, Y. Sekimoto, and R. Shibasaki, "Anomalous Event Detection on Large-Scale GPS Data from Mobile Phones Using Hidden Markov Model and Cloud Platform," PURBA2013 in conjunction with UbiComp2013, 2013.
 A. Sudo, T. Kashiyama, T. Yabe, H. Kanasugi, and Y. Sekimoto, "Human Mobility Estimation Following Massive Disaster Using Filtering Approach," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 217-224, 2016.
 Y. Ishikawa, "Research Trend and Future Prospects for Large-Scale Data Analytics," IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems, J93-D(6), pp. 781-794, 2010 (in Japanese).
 Y. Iijima and Y. ishikawa, "Processing Methods for Nearest Neighbor Queries Based on Imprecise Location Information," IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems, J93-D(6), pp. 781-794, 2010 (in Japanese).
 T. Yokoyama, Y. Ishikawa, and Y. Suzuki, "Processing All k-Nearest Neighbor Queries in Hadoop," DBSJ Journal, Vol.11, No.1, pp. 25-30, 2012 (in Japanese).
 J. Zhao, K. Sugiura, Y. Wang, and Y Ishikawa, "Simulation DataWarehouse for Integration and Analysis of Disaster Information," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.11, No.2, pp. 255-264, 2016.
 H. Fujiwara, N. Morikawa, Y. Ishikawa, T. Okumura, J. Miyakoshi, N. Nojima, and Y. Fukushima, "Statistical comparison of National probabilistic seismic hazard maps and frequency of recorded JMA seismic intensities from the K-NET strong-motion observation network in Japan during 1997-2006," Seismological Research Letters, Vol.80, No.3, pp. 458-464, 2009.
 H. Fujiwara, N. Morikawa, and T. Okumura, "Seismic hazard assessment for Japan: Reconsiderations after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake," Journal of Disaster Research, Vol.8, No.5, pp. 848-860, 2013.